Raven Baxter, Ph.D.

Early life and education

Baxter was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, and her interest in science began with a childhood telescope and a sixth-grade scholarship to U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama.^⁠[1] Her first professional role in science was in policy, as a high school research intern with Scientists and Engineers for America in Washington, D.C., where she researched political candidates and produced energy policy analyses.

She began college at 16 and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biological sciences at SUNY Buffalo State, with a master’s thesis on how cells keep proteins functional under stress and how antibodies find their targets.^⁠[2] As an Arthur A. Schomburg Fellow at the University at Buffalo, she completed a Doctor of Philosophy in Curriculum, Instruction and the Science of Learning, conferred in 2022, with a concentration in science education and a research focus on science communication. Her dissertation, Culturally Responsive Science Communication: The Messengers, Messages, and Voices in Communicating Science through Hip-Hop, developed a framework for culturally responsive science communication.^⁠[3]

Career

Drug discovery and early outreach

Baxter began her career in biomedical research, first as a visiting research scientist at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and then as a Research Scientist I in lead drug discovery at Albany Molecular Research, a contract research organization, where she screened compounds against oncology and neurodegenerative disease targets. Fortune later reported that for a long time she was the only Black person in her office at Albany Molecular Research.^⁠[4]

Concerned by what she described as the country “falling out with science,” Baxter left the laboratory in 2016 for STEM education and founded The Science Maven, a move Fortune described as “developing a next generation of talent that looked more like her and the rest of the country.” She had led STEM programming since 2015 for ASCEND, the youth enrichment program of the Gamma Phi Omega chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority in Buffalo.

Academic leadership

Baxter then moved into academic leadership. She advised first-year science students at SUNY Buffalo State, taught biology there and at SUNY Erie, and directed collegiate STEM initiatives at Health Sciences Charter School in Buffalo, where she oversaw an early college effort with D’Youville. In 2021 the University of California, Irvine appointed her Director of Diversity Initiatives for its School of Biological Sciences. Her doctoral research during those years examined hip-hop as a medium for science communication, and Baxter has described the dissertation as the foundation of her public engagement work.

Science rap and COVID-19 education

Baxter’s music brought her platform national attention. In 2019 she released “Big Ole Geeks,” a molecular biology remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Big Ole Freak” that, in Fortune’s words, she made “to challenge the notion of who could wear a lab coat,” and in February 2020 she followed it with “H.B.I.C.,” a music video featuring dozens of women in STEM.

When COVID-19 reached the United States, Baxter turned her music to public health. “Wipe It Down,” a 91-second safety rap released in March 2020, reached a wide audience within a week, and Fortune called the song “a COVID-19 primer.” “Antibodyody,” released as the first vaccines neared authorization, explained antibodies and vaccines in 60 seconds, and in 2021 she answered Nicki Minaj’s vaccine claim with the song and an invitation to a conversation. Fortune named Baxter to its 40 Under 40 in health in 2020, the State University of New York presented her with its Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence in 2021 for COVID-19 education, and Forbes named her to its 30 Under 30 in science for 2022.

Online programs and The Science Haven

Baxter founded online programs that connected scientists and students, including STEMbassy Live, a weekly online talk show she created and hosted in 2020, and Black in Science Communication Week, an online week of workshops, panels and grants for Black science communicators that she launched in October 2020. She has served on the board of directors of the Buffalo State Alumni Association since 2020.

In 2023 Baxter founded The Science Haven, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit for science education, and she serves as its President and Executive Director. Its Stellar Dreams program gives children Celestron telescopes and trains them as junior astronomers. The first cohort of 27 students received telescopes in Buffalo in February 2024,^⁠[5] and the program won a Gold Award in the first Astronaut Rock Star Awards that May. “So many things happen when you give a child a telescope,” Baxter said before the launch. In December 2026 The Science Haven will launch LearnScience.org, a free science education program Baxter founded for students from middle school through college.

Institutions and public health

National brands, museums and public health institutions have engaged Baxter as a partner on public science education. She produced two Ada Twist, Scientist videos for Netflix Jr., narrated the American Museum of Natural History’s animated series Viruses, Vaccines, & COVID-19, which won a Bronze Anthem Award, and worked with 3M, Olay and Brooks Running on national campaigns. See all campaigns and partnerships.

At the federal level, Baxter participated in White House National Space Council roundtables on space STEM education and the space workforce from 2023 to 2024 and spoke at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in January 2024. For the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the Food and Drug Administration, she authored and served as the face of Science of Immunity, a free vaccine education curriculum with five modules, 16 lessons and more than 30 videos aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards, on a course platform developed by RTI International and with funding from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.^⁠[6] Baxter has advised the Reagan-Udall Foundation on culturally responsive science communication.

As Director of Science Communication at Mount Sinai’s Cohen Center for Recovery from Complex Chronic Illness from 2024 to 2025, Baxter directed communication for an area of medicine with an emerging evidence base, spanning long COVID, myalgic encephalomyelitis and post-treatment Lyme disease. She led and co-wrote the Infection-Associated Chronic Illness Provider Manual, the nation’s first clinical manual for these illnesses, a free 180-page guide reviewed by experts in the United States and abroad.^⁠[7] Beyond the manual, she led the center’s engagement with clinicians, researchers and patients. She established the CoRE Knowledge Collaborative, a global network of clinicians and researchers offering accredited continuing medical education courses, hosted the CoRE LIVE Knowledge Sessions for the public, and led and moderated a Lived-Experience Advisory Board.

In 2025 Baxter and Dr. Ronald Gamble co-hosted the fifth season of Pfizer’s podcast Science Will Win, which won a Gold W3 Award.^⁠[8] She returned to host the sixth season, a five-episode series on cancer released in early 2026, with episodes ranging from early-onset colorectal cancer and survivorship to artificial intelligence in the clinic.

Leadership in public engagement

As Principal of The Science Maven, Baxter advises health and science organizations on public engagement strategy, science communication training, curriculum design and scientific messaging. See consulting engagements.

Baxter holds board and advisory leadership roles in science and public engagement. She serves on the board of directors of the Association of Science Communicators, where she founded and chairs the Science Communication Consortium on Ethics, and on the Board of Managers of the Washington Academy of Sciences for the 2026 to 2028 term. In 2026 members of The Evidence Collective, a network of scientists, clinicians and communicators, elected her to membership. She joined the Advisory Group of the Aspen Institute’s Our Future Is Science initiative in 2025 and gave the keynote at its 2025–26 kickoff, and in November 2025 she launched a petition asking universities and accreditors to require communication and public engagement training in science degrees. Her 2026 Comment in Nature Microbiology, “Dysbiosis and succession in the scientific infobiome,” describes the information ecosystem around science as an infobiome of voices, platforms and content.^⁠[9]

Advocacy

Baxter’s housing advocacy grew from her own experience of discrimination. While she was under contract for a home in Virginia Beach, Virginia, the seller attempted to withdraw from the sale after learning she was Black, a case The New York Times reported in May 2024.^⁠[10] In December 2024 the Times reported that she would be the face of a national campaign against housing discrimination by the National Fair Housing Alliance, supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She partners with the alliance on public education about housing rights, and in 2026 she joined Lisa Rice, the alliance’s president and chief executive, for the opening fireside chat of the National Fair Housing Conference.

Baxter advocates for public investment in science. Her 2025 rap “#NASADidThat” made the case for NASA’s science budget on the day Senate appropriators took up a bill that rejected a proposed cut to NASA science, and in 2023 she joined the National Women’s Business Council’s Women in STEM Roundtable at Howard University.

Approach and message

Baxter’s approach draws on her doctoral research in culturally responsive science communication, which examined the messengers, messages and voices that connect science with the communities it serves. She pairs evidence with joy and empathy and treats public engagement as a two-way exchange, responding directly to her audience’s questions, including skeptical ones, and inviting audiences into the research she covers. Her video, writing, music and hosted series, including Nerdy Jobs and the podcast and newsletter The Science of Life, explain the molecular science behind everyday life and examine the intersection of the technical and social sciences.

Baxter has spoken on more than 100 federal, corporate and academic stages, among them Princeton’s Amplifying Voices Distinguished Lecture Series, which she opened in 2022, Virginia Tech’s Kelly Lecture, a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health panel on disinformation and the 2023 International Space Station Research and Development Conference, where she served as master of ceremonies on opening day. Her talks make the case for inviting the public into science and for giving scientists the training and institutional support to engage the public. When Facebook launched Bulletin in 2021 with Baxter among its first writers, she told Mark Zuckerberg that the company needed “scientists and science educators to serve where they’re needed the most.” Read the conversation.

She gave the TEDxGreatMills talk “You Don’t Look Like A Scientist!” in 2020^⁠[11] and delivered the 2023 commencement address for the School of Arts and Sciences at Buffalo State University. In 2025 she joined the PBS News program Tipping Point: Turning Science Into Solutions as a panelist, and in 2026 NASA invited her to the Artemis II rollout. See all speaking engagements.

Influence and legacy

Representation in science

Baxter’s work invites audiences to see their own place in science. Her TEDxGreatMills talk asked who gets to look like a scientist,^⁠[11] and Forbes quoted her aim to “joyfully disrupt traditional cultural perceptions about scientists.”^⁠[12] Science News featured her in 2020 among five Black researchers working for diversity and equity in science,^⁠[13] and in 2022 EBONY named her a STEM Trailblazer.

In 2023 the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture featured Baxter in its exhibition Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures, where an image from her series Nerdy Jobs appeared beside a quote from the author N. K. Jemisin. Baxter wrote that she saw herself “representing the future of science.”^⁠[14] The exhibition also included a video featuring Baxter, NASA astronaut Victor Glover and Dr. Sian Proctor, who watched it together at the museum during Black Space Week in June 2023.^⁠[15] In a career conversation the museum released for students, she said, “I’d like to think that Afrofuturism is today.”

In 2025 the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg in Germany displayed the cover art for her podcast The Science of Life in Glitzer, billed as the world’s first museum exhibition devoted to glitter.^⁠[16] Baxter tied the recognition to her “fight to make space in STEM to be unapologetically YOU.”^⁠[17]

Students and educators

Baxter has spoken to students from youth programs to doctoral networks, including the Intrepid Museum’s Girls in Science and Engineering Day and Yale’s Black Postdoctoral Association, which hosted her as its first invited speaker. Educators use her videos in classroom instruction.

• This is AMAZING!!!! I teach AP Bio and I can’t WAIT to share this with my students!!!!

  @geekysciteacher

• Definitely famous. I put a bio pic of you on my classroom promethean board for women’s history month.

  @papillonnoire

• I’m 32, at the early stages of writing my application for the NSF GRFP. You’re my inspiration to reach higher and find community.

  @faithteaser

• My little girl (3 and a half) is showing a lot of promise at STEM play at her daycare, with role models like yourself being out there I thankfully have so much to show her

  @mkendrickphd

Public image

Audiences and partners have compared Baxter to Bill Nye and to Ms. Frizzle of The Magic School Bus. Reinvented Magazine named its 2021 print feature on her teaching science through song its Interview of the Year, the American Association of University Women honored her in 2022 for bringing science into pop culture, and in 2025 The Creative Collective NYC named her to its Creative Class.

Reach

Baxter’s audience of more than 660,000 people across social platforms grew through organic engagement. Her 2026 video on virgin birth in a crocodile drew more than 3.5 million views, and Forbes wrote that her “viral hip-hop music videos and other social media channels communicating scientific information to wide audiences have amassed millions of views.”^⁠[12]

Public resources

Several of the resources Baxter has led are free to the public. Clinicians, patients and caregivers can read the Infection-Associated Chronic Illness Provider Manual at no cost, and educators teach Science of Immunity free of charge. The Science Haven’s Stellar Dreams program gave Celestron telescopes to 27 students at its Buffalo launch in 2024, and LearnScience.org, the free science education program Baxter founded for The Science Haven, will serve students from middle school through college when it launches in December 2026.

Honors and awards

• 2018Arthur A. Schomburg Fellowship, University at Buffalo
• 2020Fortune 40 Under 40, Health^⁠[4]
• 2020Award for Diversity and Inclusion in Science Communication, The Outpost’s Asteroid Awards
• 2021SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence, for COVID-19 education
• 2021Young Alumnus Achievement Award, SUNY Buffalo State
• 2021Interview of the Year, Reinvented Magazine
• 2022Forbes 30 Under 30, Science^⁠[12]
• 2022AFROTECH Future 50
• 2022Woman of Distinction, American Association of University Women
• 2022EBONY Power 100, STEM Trailblazer
• 2023Anthem Award, Bronze, as narrator of the American Museum of Natural History’s Viruses, Vaccines, & COVID-19
• 2023Science Communication Award, Graduate Women in Science
• 2024Gold Award, Astronaut Rock Star Awards, for Stellar Dreams
• 2024Williamsville Wall of Fame
• 20252025 Creative Class, The Creative Collective NYC
• 2026Living Legacy Award, Cohort Sistas

Selected works

Publications

• 2017Immunological Strategies to Study GRP170 in Caenorhabditis elegans. Master’s thesis, SUNY Buffalo State.
• 2022Culturally Responsive Science Communication: The Messengers, Messages, and Voices in Communicating Science through Hip-Hop. Doctoral dissertation, University at Buffalo.
• 2025Infection-Associated Chronic Illness Provider Manual, co-author. Cohen Center for Recovery from Complex Chronic Illness, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
• 2026“Dysbiosis and succession in the scientific infobiome.” Comment, Nature Microbiology. Download PDF

Curricula

• 2024Science of Immunity. Reagan-Udall Foundation for the Food and Drug Administration.
• 2026LearnScience.org. The Science Haven, launching December 2026.

Discography

• 2019“Big Ole Geeks”, single
• 2020“H.B.I.C.”, single
• 2020“Wipe It Down”, single
• 2020The Protocol, EP
• 2020“Antibodyody”, single
• 2025“#NASADidThat”, single